Posts Tagged ‘Interfaith relations’

This post first appeared as “Interfaith Caravan Is Full of Female Rabbis” on The Sisterhood blog of the Forward.

Rabbi Amy Eilberg (photo by Rev. Steven Martin)

As the first woman to be ordained a Conservative rabbi, Amy Eilberg occupies a major place in the annals of Jewish women’s history. She has recently been squeezing her self into a very small space in the hopes of making another kind of history.

Since September 11, she and seven other interfaith clergy have been crammed into a specially decorated van traveling a large swatch of the eastern and central parts of the country. They are on the “Religious Leaders for Reconciliation Caravan,” a literal and figurative drive to “re-knit the torn fabric of American society,” as Eilberg put it in a phone interview with The Sisterhood.

The Caravan is a project of Clergy Beyond Borders, a Maryland-based conflict resolution and interfaith education organization founded two years ago by Imam Yahya Hendi, the Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University, and Rabbi Gerald Serotta, founding chair of the organization Rabbis for Human Rights.

This opinion piece first appeared as “Reaching Out to Our Muslim Sisters” on The Sisterhood blog of The Forward.

Irshad Manji

On the heels of America’s most-wanted terrorist being eliminated in Pakistan by U.S. Special Forces, the woman who was once dubbed by the media as “Osama Bin Laden’s Worst Nightmare” made a statement that I found haunting. Islamic reformer Irshad Manji made the scary point in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that President Obama was wrong in saying that “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader.” What should be keeping us up at night, according to Manji, is the fact that he actually was a legitimate Muslim leader in the eyes of many.

“Bin Laden and his followers represent a real interpretation of Islam that begs to be challenged relentlessly and visibly,” she wrote in the op-ed, which was excerpted from her soon-to-be-published new book, “Allah, Liberty and Love” (Free Press).

So what does this have to do with Jews? It has to do with us because Manji and other reformers have reached out to liberal Jews and Christians in search of allies in this challenge. Although she sees this ijtihad (a religious-intellectual struggle fueled by independent thought) as primarily the responsibility of Muslims, she calls on us to support and partner with those brave Muslims willing to engage in it.

This article was first published as “Author’s journey to Judaism helped fuel book on interfaith relationships and hidden identities” in The Jewish Tribune. Click here to read it there.

Palo Alto, CA – Many people think back fondly about their college advisors, but Andi L. Rosenthal credits Dr. Sara Horowitz, director of the centre for Jewish studies at York University, for setting her on the path that would eventually lead her to write her debut novel, The Bookseller’s Sonnets (O Books, 2010).

Rosenthal is also certain that if it were not for the undergraduate class on Holocaust literature she took with Horowitz in 1988 at the University of Delaware, she would never have begun her journey towards becoming a Jew.

Rosenthal’s study with Horowitz, who remains a mentor to her, sparked an interest in exploring her interfaith family’s complicated religious past and in discovering and nurturing her innate Jewish identity that had gone unexamined during an upbringing in Catholic churches and schools in New York. She converted to Judaism in 2002.

This personal journey, together with a professional one at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in lower Manhattan (the novel’s setting) from 1999 to 2004, has resulted in a powerful fictional story of interfaith relationships and hidden identities spanning five centuries.

The Bookseller’s Sonnets chronicles the story of a mysterious package from an anonymous artifact donor that arrives at the desk of Jill Levin, senior curator at the museum. The artifact appears to be a diary written by Margaret More, the eldest daughter of Saint Thomas More, legal advisor to Henry VIII. As Levin works with colleagues to authenticate the diary (using clues from letters arriving to her from the Holocaust survivor who donated it), representatives from the Archdiocese of New York move in to lay claim to it in an attempt to prevent its explosive contents from becoming public.

Author Andi L. Rosenthal (photo: Julie L. Cohen)

Layered over this interweaving of curatorial sleuthing and historical fiction is Levin’s contemporary struggles with Jewish self-definition and Second Generation family dynamics (the character’s own grandparents are Holocaust survivors). Rosenthal skillfully makes these challenges, as well as the museum’s milieu and day-to-day operations in the years immediately following 9/11 very detailed, textured and realistic.

Rosenthal originally wrote the book in 2005, but it went unpublished until members of the outreach committee at her synagogue, Larchmont Temple in Larchmont, NY, took an interest in it last year and offered to shop it around to connections they had in the publishing industry.

Buoyed by the fact that pre-orders for The Bookseller’s Sonnets, which will be released Sept. 16, are strong as a result of social media and word of mouth marketing, Rosenthal is looking forward to a special launch event scheduled for Oct. 24 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and a book tour in early 2011 organized by the National Jewish Book Council.

“It’s really a case of dayenu,” said Rosenthal. “It’s been one blessing after another, and I am so grateful for each one.”

She is thankful to many people who have helped her along the way to realizing her literary dreams, but especially to Horowitz, who ignited the pintele yid in her. “She was my guiding star then and she still is today.”